A Love Letter to Houston Food (and a Map to Guide You)

In this week's cover story "Eating Our Hearts Out," we've once again rounded up all of the 100 Favorite Dishes from the prior year in one convenient spot -- dishes which exemplify Houston's status as "the South's new Creole city," "Mutt City," or whichever moniker you choose to apply to the City of Culinary Excesses (my current choice).

The 100 Favorite Dishes serve as sort of a love letter to Houston food, itself a vast quilt representing nearly every country and ethnicity on God's green earth.

John T. Edge summed it up best in the August 2012 issue of Oxford American when he wrote that "all latitudes and longitudes are accessible by way of a concrete Hot Wheels track and a four-barrel Pontiac."

To explore all of the 100 dishes on our list (which is a truly noble quest), you'll definitely need to make use of the Hot Wheels tracks that make up our freeway system -- but the choice of cars is your own. You may also find this map handy in your journeys.

This year's list of 100 Favorite Dishes will gear up again in May and as you can see from the map above, there's still plenty of Houston territory to cover. Although the sprawl of our vast city can often be frustrating, that's the silver lining of it all: There are seemingly endless swaths of Houston and its surrounding suburbs to explore. There's always something new to discover here. That's what makes Houston the city I love.

Until the 2013 list of 100 Favorite Dishes gears up, pick up a copy of this week's print edition and maybe you'll find something new to love too.